This specification describes technologies relating to search query suggestions.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources, for example, video files, image files, audio files, or Web pages including content for particular subjects, book articles, or news articles. A search system can select one or more resources in response to receiving a search query. A search query is data that a user submits to a search engine to satisfy the user's informational needs. The search queries are usually in the form of text, e.g., one or more query terms. The search system selects and scores resources based on their relevance to the search query and on their importance relative to other resources to provide search results that link to the selected resources. The search results are typically ordered according to the scores and presented according to this order.
Search systems can provide search suggestions to users to help users satisfy their informational needs. For example, in response to a user entering the search query “cricket,” a search system may suggest “India South Africa Series” as a query suggestion. As used herein, the term “query suggestion” is a suggested data that can be used to refine a search or refine a search strategy. A query suggestion can be another search query, keywords, or topics to which a search query or keyword belongs. A query suggestion can be used as an additional query, e.g., the query suggestion can be processed by the search system as a query. Alternatively, a query suggestion can be a topic identifier that is used to narrow a search to a specific topic.